'Chickens' trickle home to new South Africa

Disappointed white South Africans are turning their backs on life in Australia and Britain. Tim Butcher reports from Johannesburg.

They called it the "Chicken Run", the exodus in the mid-1990s of thousands of white South Africans fearful of the increasing crime, political violence and job insecurity that accompanied black government at the end of apartheid.

But now, slowly and almost soundlessly, a group of pathfinders is making its way back, grumbling about the low standard of living it found in Australia, Britain and elsewhere, and keen to start a new life back in what it now sees as a more stable South Africa.

Ten years after majority rule, these returnees represent a significant endorsement of the rule of President Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela before him.

Grant Ravenscroft, 35, was one of the first South Africans to apply to emigrate to Australia after the end of apartheid, but he found life so tough that he has returned to Johannesburg. "Some migrations happen when there is a depression and everyone moves to survive, but the truth was the exodus from South Africa in the mid-1990s was not like that," he said.

"Things were not that bad; people still had the two Mercedes, the maid and the swimming pool, so when they got to Europe or Australia they knew what they had left behind.

"In South Africa I always owned my own business but in Perth to make ends meet I had to do day shifts serving tables in a restaurant and night shifts as a barman."

Aleck Markov, a 33-year-old dentist from Johannesburg, said: "We left South Africa because we feared for our way of life and our standard of living here. But what we found in London was so much lower than what we were used to and things have not worked out here in South Africa like people said they would. So after six years in Britain the choice was easy - to come home."

Mr Markov had no problem finding work in Britain when he arrived in 1996 and for a wage much higher than he could command in South Africa. But the high cost of living, the weather and poor public services slowly took their toll.

"It was when our two children arrived we really got the message," he said. "We were in a tiny flat with the rain beating down and the kids were going crazy, but we could not take them outside. That's when we knew we had to come home."

A website, www.homecomingrevolution.co.za, has been set up by a charity to encourage South Africans to return home. "This is the land of opportunity," it says. "Sure, it's not perfect, but hey, don't wait until it gets better, come home and make it better!"

The number of South African nationals resident in Britain in 2001 had doubled from 10 years earlier to more than 132,000, according to the last British census.